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Amsterdam, The Netherlands
The relationship between image-makers and their audience has undergone a seismic shift in recent years, but the change has happened so incrementally that we are only now able to reflect on its effects.
Growing up in Northern California in the mid-aughts, my bedroom walls were papered with magazine covers. Hardly an inch of paint could be seen. At first, I copied my older sister’s configuration of covers: music magazines and teen heartthrobs (pictured above, with my sister). Later, I began to experiment with my own arrangements. I preferred to mix in fashion and lifestyle covers with music. Sometimes I would stray away from editorial images entirely and put up the advertisements I liked instead.
Decorating my walls allowed me to show my personality and preferences. It was sort of a rite of passage; by showing my own personal taste I could show that I was maturing. Looking back now, I was curating – choosing the very best images to tell a story. In this case, it was the story of my own personal tastes.
To a lesser degree, my walls were also covered with photographic images of me and my friends. I went nowhere without a disposable camera in those days. Without the endless do-overs possible with digital photography or the overtly self-conscious posturing of social media, the poses were mostly goofy, the style was mostly regional, and the image quality mostly bad. The photographs of my friends and I in our ‘latest’ could not have been further from the slick professional images they shared space with.
Now, however, the chasm between the aesthetics of the average professional and the average amateur image has become far narrower. The availability of high quality cameras on our phones and user-friendly editing applications with predetermined options have made it all so easy. We see hyper-polished images nearly everywhere we look. This means that in our current visual culture, immediacy and honesty are sorely lacking. It is these two qualities image-makers working in the current climate have a responsibility to strive for, above all others.
Aside from the fact that most of my images were relatively poor, one reason my experiments in image-making retain their funky charm and uniqueness is because they are slow. I had the time to digest my sources of inspiration and the freedom to mix and match them as I saw fit.
Immediacy and honesty require a certain amount of thoughtfulness that can only be achieved with time. This means that in order to make authentic images, it is necessary to reject the impossibly fast pace of production creative people are often pressured to work under.
For a short time during my adolescence, patience was rewarded over hype: the oversized yellow puff coat I received as a hand-me-down from my older sister was still cool by the time I received it years after she bought it. I was only required to style it with different accoutrements and hand my camera off to someone else to snap a photograph.
Rather than moving more or less vertically, the flow of trends now spread out in every direction. Trends come and go quickly; they move at a break-neck speed and replicate themselves along a horizontal grid of traditional and social media that fans out across the globe. While on the one hand, the expansion in the direction of influence is a more than welcomed change because it is democratizing, one less than desirable consequence is that we are teetering on the brink of monoculture.
The quickening of the pace of trends and the interconnectivity of global culture has also increased waste. Excessive travel, mountains of discarded clothing in landfills, increased carbon emissions, and unchecked energy use are all part of this propensity for waste. Pushing back against the unsustainable practices in creating and displaying images is something we owe to our audience in terms of ethics, but it is also something we owe to our own practice.
Sustainable practices, such as embracing locally sourced talent, ideas, and materials, tends to lead to work that resonates more deeply with its audience. Accepting parameters and limitations as a creative challenge, rather than simply solving problems with more consumption, tends to lead to more original ideas that push culture forward. In other words, what is often considered an unseen consequence of creative work does indeed show up in what we create. Sustainable practices are antithetical to monoculture.
The lesson from those chaotic disposable camera photographs of my early youth is that the world has shifted. While glamour may need to be distant on some level to be enticing, it is now up to professionals to take up the mantle of immediacy, honesty, and urgency.
The more image-making references other images, the less impact and staying power they will have. Image-making in general is first and foremost about possibility. The advertisements and covers on my walls were not just aspirational but inspirational – I was not out to replicate them exactly. I was not even trying to replicate them very closely. They served as the raw materials that I could cut and paste to build my sense of self in the real world.
The responsibility of people who curate, create, and disseminate images is neither to reflect reality nor to provide a fantasy outlet to escape it. There is a third posture which thinks about image-makers as agents of change who provide the raw materials to push culture forward when it is stagnating. We cannot control how our audience responds, but only hope that they will create their own antidote out of what we provide.
